Overview

This book brings together leading researchers of British and Irish rural history to consider the role of the land agent, or estate manager, in the modern period. Land agents were an influential and powerful cadre of men, who managed both the day-to-day running and the overall policy direction of landed estates. As such, they occupy a controversial place in academic historiography as well as popular memory in rural Britain and Ireland. Reviled in social history narratives and fictional accounts, the land agent was one of the most powerful tools in the armoury of the British and Irish landed classes and their territorial, political and social dominance. By unpacking the nature and processes of their power, The Land Agent explores who these men were and what was the wider significance of their roles, thus uncovering a neglected history of British rural society.

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9781474438872

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Through their thematic and chronological approach, the editors have created a volume which begins to fill the gaps in the literature. Although this is just the beginning of our understanding of the extent to which the land agent influenced the diurnal management of the estate and the management of local society its case study methodology demonstrates how the approach needed varied, locally, regionally and nationally... At the core of the volume are the different relationships which land agents had to develop and thus this research will have a broad appeal, not just to those interested in rural history, but also to those whose research lies in the relationships forged in the rural community more generally. --Geoff Monks, University of Leicester Family & Community History

Author Information

Lowri Ann Rees is Lecturer in Modern History, School of History and Archaeology, Bangor University. Her research interests centre on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Wales, in particular the landed elite and their country estates. Lowri has published on paternalism and rural protest, the Rebecca Riots, Welsh sojourners in India, and is currently researching upward social mobility in Wales. Ciarán Reilly is based at the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses & Estates, Maynooth University and is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish history. Annie Tindley is Professor of British and Irish Rural History at Newcastle University and Head of the School of History, Classics & Archaeology. Her work interrogates land issues in the modern period including ownership, management and reform. In 2015 she established and became the first director of the Centre for Scotland's Land Futures, an inter-institutional and interdisciplinary research centre, and is the series editor for Scotland's Land, an interdisciplinary book series published by Edinburgh University Press. She is the author of The Sutherland Estate, 1850-1920 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and Lachlan Grant of Ballachulish, 1871-1945 (co-edited with Ewen A. Cameron, Birlinn, 2015).

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